Aatish Taseer: "The Art of Britain’s Windrush Generation Has Never Felt More Relevant"

THE H.M.T. EMPIRE Windrush was a ship that carried one of the first large groups of passengers from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom in 1948. But its name went on to become shorthand for an entire generation, roughly half a million people who emigrated out of Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean between the late 1940s and the early 1970s to the seat of a dying empire. This was a group that had been invited to Britain to rebuild the country after the Second World War. Many of them had served in Britain’s armed forces. And yet, once they’d outlived their purpose, the British government left them to fend for themselves. In 2017, during the premiership of Boris Johnson, it began to surface that the Home Office had wrongly classified some members of the Windrush generation, which led to the deportation of about 80 people. Others were denied access to work, health care and benefits.

The Windrush scandal spoke to dispossession in a literal sense, but it was also a symbolic erasure of the Caribbean community’s contribution to British cultural life in the latter part of the 20th century. Everything from the Notting Hill Carnival to Zadie Smith; reggae and calypso; new language and new fruits (soursop, custard apple) resulted from this postcolonial encounter, which, in the words of the British Sri Lankan activist A. Sivanandan, might be summarized as “we are here because you were there.”

Windrush is in one sense the ultimate symbol of an imposed dislocation, of homelessness, of people on a ship adrift on the waves of history. There are reminders all over Britain, like the renaming of a transit line in London to Windrush in 2024. It’s also an artistic movement. At a moment of rising xenophobia and nativism across the world, three artists — the painter Hurvin Anderson, 60, the multimedia artist Sonia Boyce, 63, and the sculptor Veronica Ryan, 69 — each have recently had shows in New York that examine the postwar meeting of Caribbean and British cultures, and their own individual right to belong. Their work, in oblique and direct ways, captures the strain of balancing multiple societies in one’s head — “I was essentially making paintings,” as Anderson has said, “of one place but actually thinking about another” — but also of bearing witness to the double vision that colonialism produced, that two-way traffic of looking and being looked at.

[...]

THE ACT OF using art to take possession of what history has denied you is central to the spirit of the Windrush movement. But if reclamation through art comes easily to Anderson, Veronica Ryan is a profile in diffidence. “My studio happens to be where I am,” she says, as if suspicious of any fixed idea of home. Ryan, whose work is currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, is a self-identified magpie and was born on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat. Having received a classical British education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, she has established a practice, now incorporating shelving units, now pendulous nets that hang from the ceiling, that can feel like an exploration of materiality. To enter a room where she’s been at work is to enter the air of a musty provisions shop. Bronze, plaster, stone, cloth, seeds and found objects are arranged in such a way that they give the impression of an artist who has abandoned the possibility of inner coherence, whether it be cultural or even related to a single system of thought. Magic, syncretism, religion, pathology and psychology bleed into her art, as do the different societies — Britain, the United States, Montserrat and Nigeria — that her work references. Over a video call from London, her graying dreadlocks tied in a topknot, she tells me of the time she was asked to give a talk about what it means to be a Black woman artist. The money was good, but she turned it down. It felt too reductive. “I thought, ‘No,’ ” she says, “ ‘this is not a question I’m going to start off with.’ ”

t the same time, history has come after Ryan in ways that can feel spooky. In 1995, a volcano on Montserrat erupted, all but entombing her place of origin. In 2004, there was a fire at a storage facility in East London where hundreds of works of art, including ones by Ryan, were destroyed. Ryan, who has jokingly described herself as a “bag lady,” a willful vagrant carrying her sense of home within her, was tested by real losses in the physical world, including the deaths of several family members. After the Windrush scandal was exposed, she made what must be her most overtly political work. In 2021, on a commission by the East London district of Hackney, she installed three sculptures made from marble and bronze, of a breadfruit, a custard apple and a soursop, in Narrow Way Square to honor the Windrush generation. When her mother saw the sculptures, she prayed. She had eaten soursop while pregnant with Ryan. Hackney, now full of what Ryan refers to as “hedge-fund kids,” had been a fearful place for her as a child. There were racist skinheads and Teddy boys, members of a working-class youth subculture who often wore Edwardian-style drape suits. “I still have a kind of memory and anxiety,” Ryan says of the streets where her art is now exhibited, “about what it was like formerly.”